Alongside the more conventional tasks of evangelizing the lost, edifying the saved, and ministering to those in need, Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, has set itself the goal of being ‘a conscience in the community’. I wonder if this idea isn’t worth exploring a bit within the context of a postmodern spirituality or metrospirituality because it seems to draw together a number of important emerging church preferences. These would be:
1. The requirement of a genuine, perhaps implicit rather than explicit, moral and spiritual integrity in the group of believers. This is critical: if Christians are going to appoint themselves as a conscience to the community, they will be wide open to charges of arrogance and hypocrisy.
2. The need for a corporate spirituality that embraces or connects with the full range of community interests and challenges (including social and environmental concerns). Traditional evangelical spirituality has often been too narrow to function in this way. But we would also have to ensure that we are not merely a conscience but also a consciousness of God in the community.
3. The demand for a spirituality/morality that is practical and committed, that does not merely preach but works.
4. The need for this conscience to be an integral part of the community, embedded, understood and trusted by people, wired up to the rest of the collective psychology. A conscience disconnected from the whole person is not much use.
Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
Cracking the code
When a U.S. evangelical megachurch says they want to be a conscience, that means they want to promote political, cultural, and social conservatism and nationalism. I find that disturbing and theologically problematic, but I respect their right to apply their understanding of the gospel to culture in the ways they see fit. I guess my problem for using the term “conscience,” though, is that it automatically claims the high ground for those various forms of conservatism, and makes it clear that the church is doing its part to participate in the culture wars. That is not the type of conscience that many communities are going to welcome, and laying claim to ‘conscience’ seems a pre-emptive moral strike and a sure way to offend non-conservatives in the community, if any exist.
Moving beyond evangelical mega-churches and politics, I guess I would want to know more about what someone who viewed “conscience” as part of the mission of their church understood by the term. What are the sources of and what is the nature of the conscience in an individual? How can a group share a conscience? I guess my first reaction is that churches should not conceive themselves as the conscience of the community, but they should embody the values of the coming kingdom: peace, justice, and spirituality. That embodiment will take a more practical concrete form, hopefully, than the abstractness that I associate with “conscience.” I think that’s in line with your call for practical commitment. If you have that, I’m not sure if you need to employ such a problematic and potentially offensive concept as conscience.
Conscience re-encoded?
Steve, I’m not in a position to judge whether your scepticism about this or any other U.S. evangelical megachurch is justified or not but I certainly understand your alarm in general terms. That’s why I want to take the term ‘conscience in the community’ out of the megachurch environment and see how it sounds, see if it can be made to work, in an emerging church environment.
I agree that ‘laying claim’ to being a community conscience could well be a bad move and I would also be suspicious of any group that promoted itself expressly in those terms. Nevertheless, in practice the church is bound to have some role of this nature, whether we like it or not. The question is not so much whether a group of believers functions as the conscience of a community but how it does it – and how effectively. The value of the term from our point of view is perhaps that it alerts us to a broader, more useful, and better integrated type of missional role. I would also suggest that the problematic and potentially offensive nature of the concept does not mean that it is not worth talking about. What exactly happens when you inject an alien set of spiritual and ethical values into the bloodstream of a community? Does it have any sort of healing or prophylactic function?
We should also take into account the possibility that where trust and understanding exist between believers and the community in which they are embedded, people may instinctively look to believers in their midst to articulate and embody a stronger set of values on their behalf, vicariously – so we come back to the idea of a group of believers, reabsorbed into the body of the wider society, having a priestly role. Of course, we have no official status as priests, which is why trust, consistency, integrity, faithfulness, etc., are so important. But if it genuinely worked that way, then ‘conscience’ might be a label given – no doubt still ambivalently – to the church by the community. My own experience suggests that that is not out of the question.
Conscience of Completeness
I have become interested in the structure of the Sermon on the Mount and believe that it deals with what you are saying about implicit conscience. MT 5 describes a TELOS (complete) person in God who moves beyond contempt and manipulation such that they have an overflow of grace. The challenge in MT 5:48 is for us to be TELOS like our Father is. MT 6:1 then says that the most critical issue is in private transformation, not public display. In giving, praying and fasting the focus is on appealing to God. MT 7 demonstrates that it is primarily about character development in yourself, not in fixing others, and that finding character qualified teachers is what God will use to get you there.
Going back to the question of community, why was there a crowd to listen to Jesus give a model of TELOS life? Because in MT 4 he had publicly demonstrated that he knew how to engage the problems of life. How did he get there? By engaging the Father privately over the very same questions (bread=lust of the flesh, we are more than physical; lust of the eyes=wanting to be perceived as right more than being concerned about actually being a righteous person; pride of life=a cynicism that says you might as well bow to the reality of a fallen world).
What that would look like in a community is people focusing on being complete in the justice and mercy of God such that they turn their critical conscience to questions of personal and cooperative transformation. The community experiences grace (justice and mercy miraculously brought together) in ways that make them aware of what Romans articulates about those of the world: they suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
Aggressive displays of social conscience seldom help to deal with heart issues, they just stir things up. The inevitable demonstration of our positions, not the marketing of them, happens when we really live and do as our Father in Heaven would have us do.